


The Prescience of Dawn

by allegheny



Category: Men's Hockey RPF
Genre: Angst, Dreams and Nightmares, Gen, Headaches & Migraines, Hockey Thoughts, M/M, Philadelphia Flyers, Reggie Leach cameo, Wet Dream, Winnipeg
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-02
Updated: 2020-04-02
Packaged: 2021-02-26 16:32:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,414
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23437762
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/allegheny/pseuds/allegheny
Summary: "These are his Manitoba winter nights now: Nolan wakes up like an aberration, in the strange limbo between home and away."Or, a record of Nolan Patrick's dreams and other nightmares.
Relationships: Travis Konecny/Nolan Patrick
Comments: 4
Kudos: 49





	The Prescience of Dawn

**Author's Note:**

> The connoisseur will notice that this is inspired by John K Samson's album Provincial, and The Weakerthans' album Reconstruction Site, especially the eponymous [The Prescience of Dawn](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gR8phr8F3UM).
> 
> 14 drabbles, 1 story.

**1.**

These are his Manitoba winter nights now: Nolan wakes up like an aberration, in the strange limbo between home and away. The dark sky is black ice and cast iron like childhood, the hotel room is beige and smells of the 1960's.

On road trip stops in Winnipeg everything feels too real and he dreams too much. At 21 and up to his neck in hockey and expectations it seemed he never dreamed anymore, but retreated here so far inland on all sides, his forgotten nightmares converge back together like he's the magnetic center of a continent of oneiric malaise.

**2.**

He's a child, flailing legs resisting the pull of the smooth grey ice like an awful, disturbing exception to gravity. He's bawling, hysterical and absurd, enormous damning eyes against the enormous damning sky turned towards him to observe his transgression, a capricious anomaly refusing his birthright.

There's something not quite right here, it makes Nolan sick to his stomach, an affront of some sort, black and sticky like oil spilled on the prairie, and it gargles there inside of his tiny body.

"He'll change his mind." It's more of a prayer than a certainty. Above them, the clouds gather, foreboding.

**3.**

They're a thousand miles away from either ocean and Nolan is seasick.

His bed sways from side to side; the brown floodwaters are up to his face, filling his mouth, filling his lungs.  
Through the pounding of the blood at his temples, static like waves whispers something in his ear.

Winnipeg sits right in the middle of an ancient glacial lake.  
Every century the Red River remembers this, and submerges the flatness and the silver wheat like a glass raised to the good old times.

In the drowning inky blackness of the room, Nolan splutters on the land's vestigial memories.

**4.**

January's sharp edges and distinct smell come radical and unfamiliar to Nolan, like forgetting how to ride a bike.

Out in Philadelphia, seasons bleed like cheap marker on thin paper, damp and mushy and temperate. But back here at the heart of the continent, winters freeze so deep the cold bites at his bone marrow.  
He likes to pretend it isn't so hard: he misses the contrary comfort of subarctic stability, the uncompromising austerity of the windchill framing his days neat and clean.

And yet under the early glare of the moon, he's lost in a labyrinth of snowplow tracks.

**5.**

His memory’s a sieve nowadays, leaking names and places and feelings, but he could have sworn that at some point he was destined for something.

He doesn't remember if he ever cared enough to note it down, though, so here he is now, playing jigsaw in the dark with the million fractured pieces of his brain, trying to assemble a light at the end of the tunnel.

Well, as he sweats through his sheets like the shroud of Turin and pain splits his head in two, he reckons the bottom of this pit might be a decent place to stay.

**6.**

He's a tree, pitching with the wind somewhere on the parkland along the shoelace curls of the Assiniboine. The river curves at his feet, meanders tripping him over, and he thinks to tie the glimmering loose ends together, but everything's too small to hold and his knowledge of knots has abandoned him.

TK thinks Nolan's got the looks of an aspen, all tall and lean, and smooth white bark, and golden crown.  
He never told Nolan that, though, so it must have been telepathy, something his eyes said in yet another dream.

Planted in tall grass, Nolan lets himself quake.

**7.**

Nolan dreams a stolen memory of pond hockey five decades ago, one of those images written into his blood, the generational trauma weaved into his genes, between ghosts of Osterbeiters and Holodomor skeletons.

He can see it all behind his eyelids: a stick shoved into his hands, blades on his feet like bayonets, shrill children's voices zipping across the frozen lake.

Hockey's a mad, frantic, half-possessed ice-dance, an occult ritual to ward off the frost. It's a defiance of nature, a wretched arrogant taunt.

Hockey makes him warm like a fire, like he can fly, like he won't ever die.

**8.**

He's the longitudinal center of Philadelphia, twice removed from everything and everyone behind accumulated layers of equal parts fear and irritation.

He feels electric in all the wrong ways, a fuse ready to short, a fuzzy tangle of nerves and cables and every wire is the wrong one to cut and this whole place will blow if we don't act fast.

In the mirror his image has disappeared: he's a blur of features he doesn't recognize, moving in and out of focus like a broken camera, sometimes there sometimes not, progress elusive, and he's a ghost in his own life.

**9.**

Every day he wakes up and every evening he goes to bed heavy and angry like a brick. It's like he just can't get comfortable anywhere in the hostile architecture of his mind.

In the long hallways of sleep, hockey's right there, within arm's reach, and yet every time Nolan grabs for it it disappears. His nights are agitated and translucent with the breathless chase, but Nolan keeps going, because the bastard prize he's running after has his face and name and without them he's not sure exactly who he is, if not the helpless captain of a doomed ship.

**10**.

TK’s one of those delightfully quaint rabid cases of Canadian-flavored Napoleon complex, and he walks right into Nolan’s unconscious like a lone ranger barging into a saloon, ready to turn a small frontier town on its head.

It's really not something he had planned on. Nolan's a sleek and well-oiled machine, a prototype for perfection on ice, and TK is all bad ideas and cornfield white trash. It's a corroboration of Darwinism that he'd take a liking for his loudest possible option.

Ergo, the ambient light of his paradoxical slumber rings the same tune as the tone of Travis's voice.

**11.**

When you're fighting with shadows there's no place to hide. Back in Winnipeg the good days are filled with the sugary coating of normalcy, mosquito summers and rollerblade strolls, but the Complete Works of his nights knock him restless every morning and dig solstice-dark circles under his eyes.

Nolan's just so desperate for something easy that lasts more than a half-rotation of the Earth.

He dreams he's digging for the right spanner to fix himself when TK wanders in like an extra on the wrong movie set.

"You're not broken, you idiot. You just need a little TLC, is all."

**12.**

He's dining with Reggie Leach on Falcon Lake tonight, all decked out in full Mountie getup, the golden September dusk of the last hunt before camp harsh like tunnel neons, flaring against his crimson coat.

No maple out here: just spruce. Yet it's blazing red all around them, the sky blinding red, the ice freezing red— sanguine like his 2017 Team Canada jersey.

"You ever think about how hockey's the only thing that unites this country?"

Ruby splatters against white; familiar metallic taste in his mouth.  
When the cracks open up, it's a torrent of blood that drags Nolan under.

**13.**

Travis's skin is warm and supple, and Nolan's legs feel numb and pins and needles and great.

Travis, all over him, teeth against his chest, burning touch of his fingertips, lips lighting Nolan's neck on fire.

Travis's hands are holding Nolan's wrists, the buzzing static of arousal prickling down his arms, bodies slick with sweat sliding against each other, the wet friction of their hips and the half-intelligible litany of Travis's voice against Nolan's ear, and Nolan is absurdly hard and he should be holding out but he isn't, doesn't want to—

Wakes up damp and red, boxers ruined, gasping.

**14.**

The soft buzz of Highway 1, the soft gold of winter wheat, the soft hiss of skates on ice, the soft light of coming dawn: it's so late it's early.

Nolan is gliding across the sleeping land like a boat across a lake, dancing between the tall blue pillars that paint the skyline of two cities in one like a stairway for giants, soaring bright and clear in snow-dusted streets.

The rink's surface is smooth, bare, a simple single white sheet, laid out for him like a blank page.

There, in the respite of sunrise, his blades write everything out.

**Author's Note:**

> In case you didn't notice I've been REALLY into drabbles lately. I fell in love with the one and only AngGriffen's [Burn On Big River](https://archiveofourown.org/works/333126) a while ago and in my hubris I decided to borrow the form. I've also been reading a lot of candle_beck because there's nothing like bummer mid 2000's lj fic. And also those drawings of Winnipeg Patty vs Philly Patty inspired me. 
> 
> I did a bunch of research for this, as per. It's harder to find poetic writing about hockey than about baseball, which feels like a missed opportunity, but there was enough. 
> 
> Thanks for reading this, I know this isn't a conventional fic so I'm grateful for you sticking it out til the end.
> 
> I hope you enjoyed. Please leave a comment if you did!


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